Climbing the Ladder of Business Intelligence

The goal of Climbing the Ladder of Business Intelligence is to introduce an intelligence framework that builds a foundation for success. The Ladder is really a Ladder of Business Intelligence (LOBI) that aims to create intelligent organizations in which technology systems are designed to support success.

Problems:

• Good decision making is rare in the business world
• In 2005, an estimated $150 billion was spent on IT systems that were either canceled or suffered cost overruns
• There is a great waste of human and artificial intelligence in the majority of companies
• All this means that most businesses are not operating anywhere near their capacity

However:
There are successful companies that do operate intelligently - that make good decisions, don't waste resources and make smart use of IT.

Solution:
Our goal in this book is to introduce a framework that builds a foundation for success. We will demonstrate how to use this framework to enable skillful use of technology and better use of human intelligence. Each step up the Ladder creates a more intelligent organization, one that is able to operate smarter and faster.

Jim Cates is currently the CIO of Altera, a Silicon Valley high tech company with over a billion dollars in revenue. He has over 30 years of experience in the Information Technology field. He spent 20 years at IBM in various R&D management positions developing IT tools for thousands of customers. He has also spent 10 plus years In Silicon Valley as the CIO, VP/IT and Corporate Process Officer of four high tech companies, each creating over $500 million in revenue.

Sam Gill is a professor in the Information Systems department at SFSU. Dr. Gill's career spans five decades of computing from the infant days of MAMRAM, the Israeli Ministry of Defense Computing Center, through his latest professional engagements as a consultant to fortune 1000 companies and state and federal agencies. During this span, Dr. Gill has been involved in several IT start-ups as well as managed several computing centers. Dr. Gill's latest venture was DataWiz Centers, one of the first Microsoft Solution Provider partners and the first Microsoft certified training partner.

Dr. Gill publishes (articles, books, and courseware) and teaches in many areas of information systems focusing on strategy, management, and technology. Recently, he is currently collaborating with Dean Lane on a book: CIO Perspectives. Dr. Gill's current research interests include the strategic, tactical, and operational management of Information Systems (IS), Business Intelligence, Software Testing and Quality Assurance (SQA), Information Technology (IT) Budgeting, Offshore and Outsourcing of IT, Development methodologies and frameworks, and development architectures, platforms and languages including: .NET, PHP/MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Visual Basic, C#, AJAX, and Java. Dr. Gill holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Natalie Zeituny has over 17 years of experience with world-class companies specializing in business strategy, process management and technology implementation. Natalie held number of highly visible leadership positions including the design and implementation of Corporate and IT process architecture, business effectiveness and efficiency models and alignment of cross functional business operations. Natalie is successfully managing her Business and IT Consulting firm since 2002 serving companies such as Palm, Seagate, Safeway, Brocade, Netapp, Yahoo and others

Natalie is currently using her past experience to design and create a new conscious business model that includes a new paradigm, language and practices. This will focus on providing a framework that will support businesses in becoming environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially conscious, as well as financially successful and technologically creative.